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Is there anyway to store your music on an external hard-drive and not on a Macbook laptop, and still sync the iPod and keep it up to date without it saying the iPod is corrupted EVERY GOD DAMN TIME (you may be able to guess this is causing me some frustration.) I've read around on the internet and it seems others have had this problem and it might be to do with trying to use both USB ports simultaneously, but once you go through the hassssle of restoring and re-syncing your iPod it does actually sync off the hard drive onto the iPod. Until the next magical time when gee golly guess what, it's corrupted, and you have to restore and resync again, or more likely just give up on the hope of ever listening to something new on your iPod.

I was wondering if any of you on here have found a magical solution or at least shared my pain?

i store all my files on my external harddrive and sync it to my ipod and dont generally have no problems with it. HOWEVER, it does get corrupt if i try to put loads of music on at once or fill it to full capacity. always thought this was because my ipod is old and generally knackered rather than where im storing my music.

is it a laptop? after frustrated internet scouring it seems to only be a problem for laptops, not bigger computers. i'm not trying to put loads of music on (new music at least) and my iPod is only 1/4 full so the problem baffles me.

yeah i only ever tend to use max 20gb of the 80 capacity in fear of it wiping again. its frustrating cos i cant have pretty much everything i want on there, but it does encourage me to listen to the same albums i want to properly explore.

i'm hoping to get a macbook & new ipod in the next few months so better look into these potential problems

my music takes up about half of my laptop memory space and is literally the only thing i can really remove to make space, everything else takes up much less space apart from applications like word/safari/logic etc, which are a hassle to run off a HD. ive found a few sites online of people complaining similar problems and it seems to be a bit of an issue.

Manually manage your iPod. It's not hard - I have a similar setup, albeit on a windows based laptop - I just regularly check my 'last added' iTunes playlist whenever I want to put more stuff on the iPod. No synching woes, ever.

of how you go about that? do you mean, turn off automatic syncing, and then select the 'recently added' and press sync?

i fear my iTunes/iPod won't let me even get as far as connecting the iPod up to start manually updating it as as soon as it's recognised the corruption notice comes up. but i will try and see if i can wrangle a way around this approach somehow.

Manual managing is much more hands on. Simply highlight the music you want to add to your iPod in iTunes, and drag it into the iPod icon on the playlist section. The iPod will then message you through iTunes (in the play window) that it is 'synching' the new additions but you can ignore that, pretty much. Everything is handled by the iPod's system from that point.

Basically, manually managing offers you a far greater degree of control as to what goes on your iPod, how much space you have left, etc. For example, I own an 80gig iPod Classic, but I own much more than that in my music files and via the iTunes library. I get to pick and choose what goes with me. Most people will never really need to manually manage, but music enthusiasts obviously end up with a lot more material than the hardware/software can accomodate. But if you're experiencing troubles even getting your iPod to synch at all, I think it's the best solution. The Auto-Pilot's died, time to learn how to fly the plane!